Mattrick loves spectacle--he wears rainbow-stripe Paul Smith
socks and once hired Cirque du Soleil to kick off a Microsoft
event--but he can be painfully introverted, one of many
contradictions that make the man. He’s an amiable Canadian and
yet an autocratic boss; a company man and yet one who’s unafraid
to speak his mind to his superiors; a division head who lives
like a Saudi prince and jets to work; and a press-averse guy who
likes to name-drop his celebrity friends.

His home is the largest in British Columbia, Canada and it's
worth $27 million. It has a 10-car garage, and it's filled.

When Laporte asked Mattrick how many cars he owned, he just
smiled. She said, "A dozen?" He responded, "Ish." As in, he has a
dozen-ish cars. The cars he owns include Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and
Lotuses.

He made millions when he was at
EA, and his wife is a Canadian telecom heiress.

Laporte says he preferred to
work in Vancouver, and when he had to go to Microsoft's campus,
he took a private jet.

He drops the names of people
like Steven Spielberg and Wayne Gretzky. (Examples: I'm going to
the game tonight with "my friend Wayne." Or, "Steven would just
drop by" to play video games.)

In terms of being a boss, he is tough.

Hanno Lemke, the general manager of Microsoft Studios said,
"Don has this really ambitious vision ... Then
he’s just relentless, dogged about pushing people beyond their
comfort zones."

Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft lifer, who leads Xbox marketing said,
"If people don’t deliver,
they’ve got to go. He doesn’t have the patience for that."

Mattrick is a life-long gamer.
In the '80s, he built "Test Drive," the first game that put
gamers behind the wheel. At EA he led development of "The Sims."
He is credited with commercializing motion-based technology in
Kinect that was sitting around in Microsoft's research
labs.

Another factor in his decision to join Zynga: He was going to
lead hardware at Microsoft. This sounds like a promotion to us,
but Laporte claims he wanted a bigger role at the company, which
is in the middle of a big reorganization.